In two-year college writing classrooms and beyond, peer review is one of the most widely used tools for helping students improve their writing. Despite its widespread usage, however, it is one of the most diffuse, inconsistent, and ambiguous practices associated with writing instruction. This essay aims to explore the widely varying terminology associated with a typical classroom activity, peer review. The authors argue that the terminology used ought to make explicit the underlying assumptions and goals for the particular activity; the problem, as the authors see it, is that because peer review has been adopted in so many different contexts, and for so many different purposes, the associated terminology has become stale from overgeneralization and unreflective acceptance. In order to initiate a discussion meant to flesh out the meanings, goals, intentions, and assumptions specific to the most commonly used peer-review terms, the authors provide a brief synthesis of the available literature on peer review. This essay presents exemplars from an extensive review of the scholarship that includes a wide range of theoretical essays, research studies, and practical texts that endorse a particular peer-review method or approach. Unfortunately, because so much of the scholarship on peer review allows for using multiple terms synonymously and interchangeably, it is impossible to report any universal definitions of the various terms associated with peer review; however, this overview provides at least a few logical indications of how the terminology might be reconsidered to match educators' goals to the various peer review--like activities. Short discussions of the five most commonly used terms, (1) peer review; (2) peer response; (3) peer editing; (4) peer evaluation; and (5) and peer critique, including an analysis of each term and a suggested activity based on the authors' own classroom successes are presented. (Contains 1 note.)